Homosexuality

Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction or sexual behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same sex. It "also refers to a person's sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions."

Grace, who's five, has a friend over and I hear her say to her friend, "Let's pretend we're gay." The friend goes, "What's gay?" And Grace says, "Gay is when two girls get together, dance and have fun."

Homosexuality as a "clinical" entity cannot be seriously upheld in the face of evidence that human behaviour shows an imperceptible graduation from the wholly heterosexual to the wholly homosexual. The variety of the experience which is statistically normal to the male population concerned is far greater than could have been guessed.

Alex Comfort ,"The Kinsey Report" Freedom, 1st May 1948. Reprinted in Against power and death : the anarchist articles and pamphlets of Alex Comfort, London, 1994. (p.103)

I've heard it suggested from some people that Christians are so irrationally obsessed with [homosexuality] because deep down they're terrified that Jesus himself might have been gay. There's no real evidence for it, but then there's no real evidence for anything to do with religion. So yeah, I'll buy it. Well, keep an open mind, that's what I always say. … If we take the actual Gospels as gospel then what we've got is a man in his thirties, unmarried in a culture where it's almost unheard of for a man of thirty to be unmarried. Plus, come on, you can't ignore the twelve boyfriends, especially when there's a missing passage from the Gospel of Mark that actually describes Jesus spending a night with a naked youth. We're told that the youth came to Jesus wearing a linen cloth over his naked body, and stayed with him that night, 'for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.' I bet he did. Along with one or two other little mysteries while he was at it. Well, why not? He was only human. The apostle John repeatedly refers to himself as the one who Jesus specially loved. I don't know whether he meant it "in the Greek manner", so to speak, but what would it matter if he did? This is the point. If Jesus was gay, would it negate the teachings and the parables? Would the Sermon on the Mount lose its authority if preached by the queen of queens rather than the king of kings? And if somebody could prove historically, beyond all doubt, that Jesus was in fact homosexual, would Christians then reject Jesus, or would they reject the evidence as usual? Your guess is as good as mine. From what I've read in the Gospels, I think Jesus was a pretty common sense sort of person, and I don't think he would have had a problem with anybody being who they are. I do think, though, that he had a problem with people who pretend to be one thing while being another. So if you are a closet homosexual family man with your own ministry, as I know some of you are, don't be ashamed. God knows you've got enough to be ashamed of without adding imaginary crimes to the list. It's not a sin to be gay. It's a sin, if anything, to be a liar and a hypocrite about it. So why not do yourself and everyone around you a favour, step out of that closet and show a little pride in who you really are. Some people won't like it, of course they won't. But you know how bigoted they are. You know that better than anybody. And anyway, you can ignore their opinion because now you'll have the kind of strength that only comes from being true to yourself. And who knows, it might even help to enhance your faith, if you take comfort from the real possibility that your Messiah, Mr. Jesus Christ, was a normal healthy homosexual, just like you.

Amid this whole uproar [over gays in the military], the most apt comment I heard was on my local eleven o'clock TV news when they interviewed a woman on the street. She said, "I don't understand somethin'. These guys are supposed to travel all over the world, live in trenches, sleep in mud, and walk over minefields. But they can't take some guy lookin' at 'em?"

Even though adult homosexuals have fought hard to win rights and liberties... too many people are still scandalized by the mere idea that youth discovering their gay orientation could be given the same liberties and possibilities as straight ones. Whereas the discovery of heterosexual desire is celebrated as the sign that "he's becoming a man" and therefore largely encouraged, without anyone seeing any sort of proselytizing in it, it's a completely different story when it's homosexual desire that's surfacing. Everything happens as if gays and bisexuals under 18 didn't exist, or at least shouldn't exist.

Dr. Michel Dorais, Mort ou fif.

[Among young gay men], it is the rebel who, in rejecting homophobia, develops a resistance that will protect him in a certain way from depression and suicide.

Dr. Michel Dorais, Mort ou fif.

There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.

Michel Foucault, quoted in Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Gary (Eds.) (2001). Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day. New York: Routledge. ISBN 041522974X.

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.

Sigmund Freud, letter to an American mother's plea to cure her son's homosexuality, 1935.

I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality … I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say -- the last and the most profound.

Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts... There are two important point: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error.

John Gagnon, "The Eplicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research", 1990.

From the perspective of scripting theory, same-gender erotic preferences are elicited and shaped by the systems of meaning offered for conduct in a culture. What is usually construed as culture against "man" or culture against nature is thus actually conflict among differently enculturated individuals or groups.
What is required is a constant recognition that acts of usage and explanation are acts of social control in the strong sense, that "homosexual" and "homosexuality" are names that have been imposed on some persons and their conduct by other persons -- and that this imposition has carried the right of the latter to tell the former the origins, meaning, and virtue of their conduct.

The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestiongly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors... The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into hetersexuals and homosexuals, is also an artefact that rests on a grave error, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heteorsexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual continuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts.

As long as our culture makes coming out an act of civil disobedience, being gay will be a political statement. Accept, at least for now, that your sexuality has political ramifications.

Kenneth Hanes, "The Gay Guy's Guide to Life".

Loosen up. Being masculine doesn't mean being a statue. Wrists were made to bend.

Kenneth Hanes, "The Gay Guy's Guide to Life".

Before you criticize queens, fairies or someone who acts "too queer", consider where we'd be without them.

Kenneth Hanes, "The Gay Guy's Guide to Life".

When a straight couple's relationship fails, it's because of his/her drinking, inability to commit, infidelity, and so on. In other words, a straight couple's relationship fails because of personal flaws, not because its participants are heterosexual. But when a gay relationship fails, "they" say it's because gay relationships inherently can't work. Call this double standard what it is - a crock of homophobic crap.

Kenneth Hanes, The Gay Guy's Guide to Love.

Nobody knows what "causes" homosexuality any more than they know what "causes" heterosexuality. (Of course, there is far less interest in what causes the latter.) Overtly, the old psychoanalytic bugaboos are dead; there is no evidence, according to the Kinsey Institute, that male homosexuality is caused by dominant mothers and/or weak fathers, or that female homosexuality is caused by girls' having exclusively male role models. Furthermore, children who are raised by gay and lesbian couples are no more likely to be homosexual than children of heterosexual couples. Nor do people become adult homosexuals because they were seduced by older people or went to same-sex boarding schools...
Though the causes of sexual orientation are unknown and the definitions fluid, the likelihood of converting a homosexual to a heterosexual orientation, or vice versa, is very slight. Some homosexual men and women voluntarily come for therapy to change from same-sex to opposite-sex partners, but it is not clear whether the limited "success" rate refers to a change in their feelings and the pattern of their desire, or just in their ability to consciously restrict their sexual contact to members of the opposite sex.

Patricia Hersch, The Family Therapy Networker, Jan/Feb 1991.

I dunno how you all feel about it, gays in the military. Here's how I feel about it. Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in. End of fucking story.

You know, I'm so sick - I've watched all these fucking congressional hearings and all these military guys and the pundits seriously, "Oh, the esprit du corps will be affected", and "Oh we are such a moral..." Excuse me?! Aren't you all just fucking hired killers?! Shut up!

Bill Hicks (comedian), on gay people in the military, Rant in E-Minor.

We do not know-though we theorise and penalise with ferocious confidence-whether the "normal" sexual relationship is homo-, bi-, or hetero-sexual.

None of the Gospel writers, nor the missionary Paul, nor the formulators of the Tradition, possess the psychological, sociological, and sexological knowledge which now inform our theological reflections about human sexuality. They knew nothing of sexual orientation or of the natural heterosexual-bisexual-homosexual continuum that exists in human life. They did not postulate that persons engaging in same-gender sex acts could have been expressing their natural sexuality. They presumed that persons engaged in same-gender acts were heterosexual, presumed only one purpose for for sexuality (procreation) and presumed that anyone engaged in same-gender sex acts was consciously choosing perversion of what was assumed to be natural sexuality (i.e., heterosexuality). We now know that same-gender sex acts have been observed in a multitude of species from sea gulls to porcupines... We know that same-gender oriented persons can experience deep love with one another and can nurture meaningful, long-lasting relationships.

The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species.

It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as hetereosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds.

Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.

What do you mean, since when did I become such a radical fairy? Since I started knowing twits like you, you twit!

Larry Kramer, Just Say No.

This pioneer of sexology [Krafft-Ebing] even came to question whether homosexuality might be innate (and people began to forgive us for living, as if it would matter to anyone if being an Atlético de Madrid fan was innate or not.)

Now then, I hasten to repeat that these practices [S&M] are certainly not usual or universal among us, but rather are variants practiced by a minority that is not representative of all gay people, although they do make up an identifiable sector that I don't want to leave out (as do many politically correct gay people, who like to give the impression that gay men only sodomize each other on Versace cushions by candlelights to Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach's Suites for Cello.)

It is my opinion that while the word bisexual may have its uses as an adjective, … it is not only useless but mendacious when used as a noun.

John Malone, Straight Women/Gay Men.

Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not.

The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior... we shall not really succeed in discarding the straitjacket of our cultural beliefs about sexual choice if we fail to come to terms with the well-documented, normal human capacity to love members of both sexes.

Jackie Biskupski is running for a seat in the Utah Legislature, and she's attracting a lot of attention because she's a lesbian. Her Republican opponent, Dan Alderson, is a staunch Mormon, and is running a negative ad campaign calling her lifestyle abnormal and deviant. His six wives agree.

Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality.

Kate Millett, Flying.

Concerning the Pope's claim that homosexuality is 'unnatural'. Perhaps the Pope is suggesting that it lies beyond the scope of 'normal' human behavior. If so, this has uncomfortable implications for an association of old men who wear dresses, hear voices and practice ritual cannibalism. Self-enforced celibacy is all but unknown among other animal species. If any sexual behavior is out of tune with the natural world, it is surely that of the priesthood.

George Monbiot, The Guardian, July 13, 2000.

Bisexuality should be the norm...It's the cure for many problems. I don't believe in gay versus straight. The message of the gay liberation movement should have been freedom of sexuality, not antagonism toward sexuality other than gay sex. Most people are going to want to be straight, this is true, be cause most people breed, and nature wants us to breed. However, I believe in the liberation of all avenues of pleasure, and I want all straight people to have their options open without it implicating them. The impulses are there if they aren't repressed, so people should choose to live without those labels.

Many men, labelled homosexual by themselves and others, want to be fathers. Their beliefs and those of your society leads them to imagine that they must always be heterosexual or homosexual. Many feel a desire toward women that is also inhibited. Your male or female orientation limits you in ways that you do not understand. For example, in many cases the gentle "homosexual" father has a better innate idea of manliness than a heterosexual male who believes that men must be cruel, insensitive, and competitive.

Jane Roberts in The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, p. 89.

I don't mind straight people as long as they act gay in public.

T-shirt worn by Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls during a network-TV interview.

If I was gay, there would be no closet, you would never see the closet I came out of. Why? I would have burned it for kindling by the time I was 12. Because I know with all certainty in my mind, there is nothing wrong with being gay, and you know it.

The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

He told me to pull my socks up; find a nice girl and get married. I told my doctor I wanted to see a psychiatrist. He said I was a namby-pamby. He told me to get a piece of paper and draw pictures of nude women. I think he was off his rocker.

Michael Schofield, A Minority.

Insistence on having a sexual orientation in sex is about defending the status quo, maintaining sex differences and the sexual hierarchy; whereas resistance to sexual orientation, regimentation is more about where we need to be going.

Deviant (definition): A person who wanders from the One True Path and is caught urinating somewhere in the midst of the unthinkable. A person taking any exit ramp off the freeway of self-righteousness."

Gays are not oppressed on a whim, but because of the specific need of capitalism for the nuclear family. The nuclear family, as the primary -- and inexpensive -- provider and carer for the workforce, fulfilled in the nineteenth century and still fulfills an important need for capitalism. Alternative sexualities represent a threat to the family model because they provide an alternative role model for people. Gays are going to be in the front line of attack whenever capitalism wants to reinforce family values.

Louise Tierney, "Looking to the Future".

The reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy the sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. The plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about.

The ongoing psychopathic hatred of same-sexuality has made the United States the laughingstock of the civilized world. In most of the First World, monotheism is weak. Where it is weak or nonexistent, private sexual behavior has nothing to do at all with those not involved, much less the law. At least when the Emperor Justinian, a Christian monotheist, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our monotheists, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that loony text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.

Gore Vidal, (The Great Unmentionable) Monotheism and its Discontents, essay

He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain.

The crime of sodomy is a crime against God and man and its practice is a terrible step to the total demoralization of any country and must inevitably lead to the breakdown of all decency within the province.

If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of your nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it'll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, it isn't necessarily something we ought to open our arms to.

In an article published seventy years ago Erich Bethe observed that the intrusion of moral evaluation, 'the deadly enemy of science', had vitiated the study of Greek homosexuality; and it has continued to do so. A combination of a love of Athens with hatred of homosexuality underlies the judgments that homosexual relations were 'a Dorian sin, cultivated by a tiny minority at Athens' (J.A.K. Thomson, ignoring the evidence of the visual arts) or that they were 'regarded as disgraceful both by law and … by general opinion' (A.E. Taylor, ignoring the implications of the text to which he refers in his footnote)...I know of no topic in classical studies on which a scholar's normal ability to perceive differences and draw inferences is so easily impaired; and none on which a writer is so likely to be thought to have said what he has not said or to be charged with omitting to say something which he has said several times.

Forty-six now and dying by inches, I finally see how our lives align at the core, if not in the sorry details. I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a gay brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin world of the closet. Yes yes yes, goes a voice in my head, it was just like that for me. When we laugh together then and dance in the giddy circle of freedom, we are children for real at last, because we have finally grown up.

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

Melvin Udall: Never, never, interrupt me, okay? Not if there's a fire, not even if you hear the sound of a thud from my home and one week later there's a smell coming from there that can only be a decaying human body and you have to hold a hanky to your face because the stench is so thick that you think you're going to faint. Even then, don't come knocking. Or, if it's election night, and you're excited and you wanna celebrate because some fudgepacker that you date has been elected the first queer president of the United States and he's going to have you down to Camp David, and you want someone to share the moment with. Even then, don't knock. Not on this door. Not for ANY reason. Do you get me, sweetheart?

"It was January 1963 when Johnny came home for a gift for me. He said 'I bought it for you because I love you and I bought it for you because it's your birthday, too.'. He was so very nice, he was so very kind to think of me, at this point in time....I just want you to be mine. I don't want this world to shine. I don't want this bridge to burn. Oh Johnny do you miss me? I just want to feel free."

Shock the middle class, take it up your punk rock ass.
You rub your puny thing, when you see studs with tight jeans pass you on the street.
Who wears short shorts? You wear short shorts.
You're so full of shit
Why don't you admit that you don't have the balls to be a queer.

Screeching Weasel, "I Wanna Be a Homosexual".

Better pray for your sins. Better pray for your sins, 'cause the Gay Messiah's coming. No it will not be me. Rufus the Baptist I be. No I won't be the one....

When a m-m-m-minute turned into a mile
And then I broke that grin, and I cut it out
And you got all turned on by the taste of your sin
When I mention blue, all you thought was color
When you mention drugs, all I thought was sober
When your pants came off and I turned you over
When you mention blue

Kill! Smile! Cut it out for me this time!
Smile, haven't seen him smile in a while

Margaret Cho in her stage show "I'm the One That I Want". (Extensive exclusion of Ms. Cho's opinions on homosexuality at her wiki-link).

I love the word "faggot," because it describes my kind of guy! You see, I am a fag hag. Fag hags are the backbone of the gay community. Without us, you're nothing! We have been there all through history guiding your sorry ass through the underground railroad! ...We went to the prom with you!

[quoting her friends from high school, Alan and Jeremy] I do not need nobody tellin' me who I am! I know who I am!... I be walkin' down the hallway, they call me names. They call me faggot, they call me sissy, I say, 'Oh yeah? Well, you forgot, I'm also a model and a actress, so fuck you too!'

I'm queer, I'm gay, I'm homosexual, I'm a poof, poofter, ponce, I'm a bumboy, batty boy, backside artist, bugger, I'm Bent. I am that arse bandit, I lift those shirts. I'm a faggot arse, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener, I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom, I'm Moses in the parting of the red cheeks. I fuck and I'm fucked, I suck and I'm sucked, I rim them and wank them and every single man's had the fucking time of his life. And I'm NOT a pervert.

-Oh. Well, Stanley, I guess you came to the right person. Sit down. ...Stanley, gay people - well, gay people are evil. Evil right down to their cold black hearts, which pump not blood like yours and mine, but rather a thick vomitous oil that oozes through their rotten veins and clots in their pea-sized brains, which becomes the cause of their Naziesque patterns of violent behaviour. Do you understand?

-I guess.

-Good. I'm glad we could have this little talk, Stanley. Now you go outside and practice football like a good little heterosexual.

The religious scholars have said that [homosexuality] is uglier than adultery...This act is not done even by beasts....A donkey never mounts another donkey....The Prophet said about them: "Kill both the one on top and the one underneath." Do you know what Ali Abu Taleb said? "Kill them both and burn them." After they are killed, they should be burned.